New Andromeda Hotel

Short Fiction | Rudi Dornemann

The facade of a grand hotel, right there on the street with all the real buildings. Like a movie set, it's nothing but a painted flat on the front. 

You go in through the doors bearing the painted silhouette of a bellhop in a tasseled cap, and there's another sidewalk in the facade's shadow and store-fronts whose neon never dims day or night. 

On the scaffolding that backs the facade, sidewalk vendors have suspended their wares from the rebar diagonals. Here are aquatints of lost kings and queens, birdcages lined with maps of the heavens, and glass-covered boxes containing games with odd numbers of mismatched but exquisitely carved tokens and boards covered with intricate eye-bending geometries. 

These are all forgeries. The kings and queens can be found busing tables at the automat around the corner. The cages have no doors to let birds in. The star maps on their floors show no known constellations. And the games? No one knows how to set up the pieces, what to do when their turn comes, or how to tell winning from losing. 

But it all works out. The vendors of the secret sidewalk are, to a man and a woman, entrepreneurial geniuses.

When the royal etchings become a fad with the designers who decorate the interiors of all the actual fully-dimensional hotels, the kings and queens can afford to buy out the automat. They rediscover old family recipes and begin devising new ones. The slices of pie behind the little plexiglass doors have flakier crusts and fillings made with berries sourced from rooftop gardens throughout the city. Goulash Tuesdays send lines snaking around the block, and the mashed potatoes and peas in their little porcelain boat, if unaccompanied by the gravitas of an entree, are known to induce ecstasies even to the point of speaking in tongues.

The birds are perfectly happy outside the cages, and are quite competent at astral navigation without the benefit of maps.

The games are bought by strangers from out of town who pay with crumpled, parrot-colored notes that the vendors are unable to exchange at any bank and wind up framing and selling to those hotel interior decorators, who, full of goulash and pie, their hearts still aflutter with revelatory starches, would, frankly, buy just about anything at this point.